Why the drive to make the self safe quietly caps the very life it was meant to secure.
Almost everyone alive today is inside the same quiet project, whatever their culture or creed: the project of making the self safe. We accumulate — money, possessions, credentials, information, status — and each thing we gather is, underneath, an attempt to depend a little less. To reduce the future’s uncertainty. To need no one. To hold the self steady against a world that will not hold still.
Across very different societies, the same disquiet is surfacing. Western professionals burn out on endless optimisation. East Asian societies strain under hyper-competition and credentialism. Communities everywhere feel the older bonds of reciprocity thinning under market logic. Younger generations inherit material abundance alongside loneliness, anxiety, and a vague grief. The details differ; the intuition is shared — that something essential has been lost. Not comfort, not technology, but a way of being in reality that is not run by calculation.
It is tempting to call this “greed,” but that is too small. Something deeper is at work — call it the urge to compress: to reduce the overwhelming complexity of reality into something we can hold, manage, and own. Wealth to compress the future into safety; possessions to compress dependence into self-reliance; credentials to compress ambiguity into a fixed identity. Each is an attempt to build a protected island against the open ocean of a contingent, relational existence. (That this is the single deepest human movement is a lens, not a settled law — but it explains a surprising amount, and it is worth trying on.)
It is an old intuition, too. The wisdom traditions, in their different vocabularies, have long warned against exactly this — the attempt to replace participation with possession, to own one’s way out of dependence rather than to live inside it consciously. Worth noticing — not because the agreement settles anything, but because the warning is stable enough to examine structurally rather than merely admire.
That is where this programme offers something the old intuition leaves implicit: not just that the escape from dependence is unwise, but why, structurally, it cannot work — and why it tends to produce the opposite of what it sought. Two things happen.
First, it caps the rise. To sustain the belief that one is self-sufficient, a system must hold a blind spot — it must not look at the dependence it is in fact living on. And that blind spot becomes a ceiling. To rise to a higher form of being — deeper integration, real resonance with others and with oneself — needs exactly the transparency that the denial of dependence forbids. The orientation that says “I need nothing” is precisely the one that cannot climb. The escape from dependence puts a quiet seal on the very development it was meant to secure.
Second, as the anxiety to hold on and control grows, the project turns to extraction. The friction a “self-sufficient” system removes from its own experience is rarely dissolved; it is exported — onto workers, communities, ecosystems, the future. Capability without integration is extraction. The streamlined life is often a life whose complexity is being carried, out of view, by someone else. What was meant as security becomes its opposite: a hollowing, for oneself and for others.
Here is the crux, and it is measurable. We have learned to read welfare as wellness — accumulation as flourishing. But the two come apart, and the gap is by now well documented: across wealthy societies, material security has risen for decades while meaning, trust, and felt wellbeing have stalled or fallen. A system can grow its stores and hollow at the same time — success that has quietly stopped growing.
Which is why the decisive question is what we choose to measure. A society or an institution does not rise by accumulating more; it rises through the things that actually let it hold complexity together rather than offload it — trust, coherence, renewal, the wellbeing of its bonds, the slow climb to higher integration. Those are the variables this programme is built to read, precisely because a balance sheet cannot see them and an extractive orientation cannot afford to look. Abundance, on this reading, is not the size of the hoard but the health of the flow: what stagnates decays, what circulates nourishes — as true of trust, knowledge and love as of wealth.
None of this is an argument against wealth, knowledge, order, or safety. They are goods, and a society needs them. It is an argument against their absolutisation — the almost invisible conviction that if we gather enough of them we can step outside the human condition and stop depending. The way through is not to renounce the world but to inhabit it differently: to hold what we have as trust rather than wall, to keep it flowing rather than stored, and to receive the irreducible complexity of a life as the medium of growth rather than a problem to be optimised away. The end, in other words, is not domination but participation.
The Great Homecoming — an independent research programme on why systems cohere or fragment. Offered as a reflection: a lens, not a settled law. Contact: Wim Van Laere.